Tech Tip: Combining/Merging Bookmarks From a Different Firefox Profile

Happy New Civil Year!
Let’s suppose you collected some bookmarks in a different Firefox profile (possibly on a different
computer or system, or in a different profile), and wish to place them
somewhere under your current or main profile’s bookmark tree - how can it
be done? I had a need for that and in this entry, I describe a solution that worked for me.

First of all export your bookmarks from the source profile to a JSON
file (“Bookmarks → Show All Bookmarks → Import and Backup → Backup…”)

Create a new Firefox profile in the machine of the target profile.
(see this page
for more information about Firefox profiles.).

Import the bookmarks from the JSON file to it (while overriding the default
bookmarks).

Copy all the folders you want to merge to the system clipboard
(Ctrl+C or equivalent).

Tel Aviv, Israel: the GNU (= “Guile N' UNIX”) project announced today
that following the popular decision to integrate GNU Guile (= an implementation
of the Scheme programming language) into GNU Make, it is going to integrate
GNU Guile into the various tools inside GNU coreutils. So for example, GNU
cat will have a "-g" flag that will allow embedding Scheme expressions, GNU
echo will gain a similar flag, and GNU true and GNU false will allow evaluating
Scheme expressions for truth or falsehood. It is not yet clear what
functionality GNU head and GNU tail will gain by the integration.

O’Reilly Media announced that it will publish a new edition of its
series of
books, which includes Mastering cat and Mastering echo to
cover the additional functionality provided by GNU Guile, and we will give
an overview of the additional functionality in
the
usergroups of the cat mongers, the echo-chamberists, and the (GNU) true
believers.

“If it’s not bloat, it’s not us.”, said Richard Stallman, the colourful
head of the GNU project, and started to sing the Free Software song. Linus
Torvalds was not available for comments about the proposal to integrate
GNU Guile into the Linux kernel.

rsync.net is a good service (and a not too
pricey one) for remote storage of data (for backups/etc.) based on open
protocols and open source applications. One thing that bugged me there however,
was that I couldn't find a way to copy a remote file to a different
name, because the SFTP client does not support a copy operation, and because
I could not get to a login shell by sshing my rsync.net account. Apparently,
it's doable and not very hard.

What you need to do is type
ssh my_account@somewhere.rsync.net cp [source filename] [destination filename] and
it will run the remote UNIX "cp" command to copy the file. You can access
some other remote UNIX commands like that such as "ls".

Freecell Solver version 3.22.0,
has been released. Freecell Solver 3.22.0 is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library
and some command line applications), for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

The highlights of this version are some bug fixes: the Win32 NSIS (= Nullsoft
Installer) package should now build, run and process the presets (e.g:
-l as properly). Furthermore, there's a bug fix to the command line
flags processing, where flags whose prefixes are known flags were erroneously
recognised as such (e.g: --resetjunk vs. --reset).

On the new features side, the
JavaScript-based solver
now accepts arbitrary fc-solve command line options, so it can be used to
solve any of the supported variants of Solitaire, as well as support most other
fc-solve features.

This Yom Kippur, I again went over my blogs from the last year,
and tried to draw some conclusions. (It's already Sukkoth and
Talk Like a Pirate
Day, so I decided to blog about this already.). I again noticed
that I didn't blog a lot most of the time, but I guess no real disaster
occured due to that.

This year I had a lengthy
hypomania,
which was followed by a period of working a lot on code, and then
a period of tiredness and feeling of lethargy (though I was almost always
constantly doing something), and now I've started working as a software
developer, which keeps me busy. The Hypomania made me realise several things
that I have done or thought wrong, so it was not too bad.

This year I finished some books, watched some films, added a lot of content
to my home site, and made some new friends online and offline, so I can be
proud of myself.

There were a few times, when I got into some trouble or made people angry,
especially during the hypomania, but I hope I have drawn the right conclusions.

Shanah Tovah, Gmar Hatimah Tovah, Happy Sukkoth, and Happy Talk Like a Pirate
Day to everybody.

tmux is a usable and open source
terminal multiplexer (that allows one to run several programs in the same
terminal, detach them, split them into windows and viewports, etc.) which
I've been happily using after switching to it from GNU screen. Some weeks
ago, I noticed that if I keep tmux open in a
konsole tab, then
eventually that tab got highlighted as modified, even if there was no activity
in the tab. I realised the problem had to do with the fact that tmux displays
the current time by default.

In order to fix it, you can use a line like the following in your
~/.tmux.conf file:

set -g status-right '#H'

-g applies the assignment globally, and '#H'
displays the hostname (and not the time or whatever else is there by default).

While searching for an answer, I ran into the
powerline project
which provides much more functionality, seems like an overkill for me,
but may work for you.

In order to completely disable video in VLC, from the command line, use
the --novideo command line flag - this way only the Audio will
be heard. To do the same in mplayer, use the -novideo flag.
You can do the same for audio using --noaudio and
-noaudio respectively.

A different propsoed solution is using -vo none in mplayer
or --vo none in VLC, but this causes the video to still be decoded
(just not presented) - at least in VLC.

Freecell Solver version 3.20.0,
has been released. Freecell Solver 3.20.0 is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library
and some command line applications), for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

The highlights of this version are some major optimisations to the solving
code of Simple
Simon, as well as many code cleanups, refactorings and smaller
optimisations. Furthermore, the “qualified-seed-improved” preset was added,
which yields shorter solutions.

Freecell Solver version 3.18.0,
has been released. Freecell Solver 3.18.0 is available in
the form of a source archive, from
the
download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library
and some command line applications), for automatically solving several
variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

The highlights of this version are the new
port to
JavaScript, courtesy of the wonderful
emscripten compiler
from LLVM to JavaScript, that allows Freecell Solver to run inside modern
browsers, as well as the fact that the test suite and the relevant now work
on 32-bit systems (previously they only worked on 64-bit ones).